CLAREMONT >> Big data is here.
The analysis of complex sets of digital information to solve problems in a wide variety of areas such as geography, finance, the weather, demographics and public health, is increasingly becoming common thanks to the new cloud-based computing model and increasing connectivity.
This incorporation of big data, in order to aid research and everyday decision-making, was the theme of an academic conference, called “Big Data, Better World,” held Friday afternoon at Claremont Graduate University.
The increasing use of big data by the average person, and by institutions that may not have had easy access to such information in the past, has the promise of becoming transformative in a positive way, according to researchers.
The conference addressed the issues and promise surrounding the new approach to science and research.
Jack Dangermond, founder and president of Redlands-based Esri, the world’s fourth largest privately held software company, was keynote speaker, sharing his vision of empowering the masses through the public use of spatial data, which had once been the domain of government and industry.
Dangermond said he hopes the use of geographic information systems, or GIS, which governments, for instance, use to model climate change, track the Ebola outbreak in Africa, or predict flooding and crime, will become more widespread as technology and everyday decision-making become more intertwined.
“What it means in terms of social organizations is that different disciplines or different departments in organizations can start to share their information and break down these ‘stovepipes’ (information sharing restrictions),” Dangermond said. “I’m hopeful that this is what Tom (Horan, professor of business information systems at CGU) is really up to on this campus, getting all the different departments here, and all of the Claremont Colleges, to start sharing and using each other’s science as it’s evolving, and that Ph.D. projects are shared as services, so that as a Ph.D. student graduates, it isn’t a book that gets put in the library, and maybe I’ll find it. No, it’s living services that are persistent and used by scientists on top of scientists.”
Esri software, called ArcGIS, is used by practically every federal agency, more than 350,000 organizations globally, including the 200 largest cities in the nation, most other countries, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies and more than 7,000 colleges and universities.
Revenue for the company last year topped $1 billion. Dangermond recently pledged $1 billion in mapping software to all of the nation’s K-12 schools to improve student aptitude in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, knowledge.
“What’s going to happen over the next two years will blow open through the cloud and device applications support, which will allow campuses and society to have access to this rich, well-documented information,” Dangermond said of a coming information explosion through the use of mobile apps accessing GIS information through cloud-based server computer networks. “I’m talking about having access to rich authoritatively sourced information you can access. Casual users can check out how Ebola is doing today, just like how we check out the weather.”
Horan, an organizer of the conference, agrees that the more accessible use of big data in academia will be transformative.
“For researchers, big data is transformative,” Horan said. “Right now, we email our fellow researchers. Imagine that we don’t have to email our fellow researchers and we can just go out there and get all the data. Now we have access. … It changes the style of research that’s done, and students have to learn about it and faculties have to adjust, retool in some ways, and learn to use these recent tools.”
Patricia Easton, professor of philosophy, vice provost of student services, and co-director of transdisciplinary studies at the university, said big data is helping connect research between the various schools and disciplines.
The conference is the first part of a two-year initiative at the university to connect all of its departments through the use of big data in their research, officials said.
“Our idea is both in the classroom and in our research and in our thinking, we need to bring multiple disciplines together when there are complex problems, and big data is a perfect example of it,” Easton said. “It raises all sorts of interesting questions on the humanistic side about privacy, about how we should use the data, about what the data means and what the future holds with it.”
